Did you stop reading my post at the point you quoted? Because I find it hard to believe that you would still be confused about where I was coming from if you’d read the whole post. Did you not read the part about the difference between public or societal morality (things regulated by law for everyone) and personal morality (things that each person decides for themself)? What’s not clear about that?
If you read my first post on the subject, you will see that I say that I do regard population control (and several other reasons) as a valid reason to kill animals. It is only “killing for fun” that I objected to, and I related all my points to “recreational hunting”.
Yea, that’s a great fucking idea. Use my tax money to pay people who aren’t working to do something that thousands of people want to do at no charge. Oh, plus we get to arm them as well. Fucking brilliant. 
So, we would only give hunting licenses to unemployed people? Dumb idea.
It would be interesting to have a new reason to hope for a layoff. 
Hunters aren’t just a group of grunts that you can rely on to cull the herd when you need it and be treated like crap the rest of the time. If not for hunters there wouldn’t even be wildlife in this country as we know it now. Sportsmen raise ten times as much money for wildlife conservation as the rest of the citizens combined. (cite is a factcard that I got in my bowhunters ed class). We pay special taxes on ammo and equipment that goes towards conservation. It’s our license fees that pay the salaries of the conservation officers.
Your claim, however, was not that eating meat, or being predators, was encoded in our genes. Your specific claim was that hunting is encoded in our genes. Quite a different thing.
Furthermore, there are many behaviors that human beings used to engage in, but no longer egage in due to advances in technology or social expectations. While humans might still eat meat, it is not necessary for most humans, especially in a country like the United States, for people to go out and shoot their own meat.
Also, you still fail to address the distinction that has been drawn by quite a few posters in this thread between hunting for meat and hunting for fun.
This represents the most fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality that i have ever witnessed. Where is it written, apart from on your pea brain, that an issue need have a 90% “supermajority” to be an issue of morality?
Contrary to your ridiculous assertion, the question of whether two people of the same gender should be allowed to marry is an issue of morality. So are the issues of consenting adults having sex, and hunting animals. The fact that you might disagree with other people’s moral positions on these issues does not mean that they are not moral issues.
And now you completely contradict your previous paragraph, and concede that these are issues of morality after all. Furthermore, your very claim that people should not attempt to apply their personal moral issues to other people is, in itself, a moral claim, a claim about the nature of human relations and the extent to which society should (or should not) be governed by a single moral code.
Also, you’re forgetting that, of all the people in this thread who say they find killing animals somehow wrong, i don’t think that anyone has called for it to actually be banned. They are, in fact, simply maintaining their “personal morals” (as you would call it) and choosing not to hunt. And in this thread, they are telling other people what their personal morals are. There is no effort at coercion; merely an expression of their own moral position.
Well, seeing that almost all hunting in this country is motivated by recreation, and it still provides valuable economic and ecological services to humans, game herds, and nongame species, why might one particularly care about the individual motives of the hunters.
In other words, there’s something that needs to be done. There are people who volunteer to do it, for whatever reason. Win-win. Pass the venison.
I know. There is a lot of fun to be had being outdoors and seeking out wildlife. I just believe there is quite enough fun without bothering with the killing part.
“stupid and ignorant”, eh? What a convincing argument. Actually, I get a great deal of enjoyment out of going into the countryside and seeking out and enjoying nature and wildlife. I know how difficult it is to see many animals (except in pseudo-zoos like Yellowstone). But I do not need to kill any of the wildlife to enhance my enjoyment.
More powerful rhetoric.
And yet you do exactly that…
Actually, I am not equating recreational hunting with slavery - just pointing out that the thought process can be same. Some things that are regarded as perfectly natural by some people are regarded as immoral by others and sometimes those in the “it’s immoral” camp win out in the end. Going by the decline in hunting and the general increasing concern over animal welfare, I think that process is happening with recreational hunting.
It is. We’re built as omnivores. We have structural characteristics consistent with predatory species. We hunt (or domesticate animals) to kill to eat. It is encoded in our genes.
Of course it is. Why do you think you’re eyes are attracted to movement?
Not true. Look five posts up and you can see TwistofFate’s rediculous idea of only allowing unemployed people to hunt. That’s coercion. I have a job and under his plan I can’t hunt bear anymore.
That’s because his “point” is irredeemably stupid.
The morality of sport hunting doesn’t depend on the size of your country, and it also doesn’t depend on the current position of Venus in its orbit around the sun or what color underwear I’m wearing right now. His “point” is irrelevant.
:sigh:
Your eyes.
Carry on!
Oh, and Ogre, I haven’t seen your handle in a long time. Did you take a break from the board for a while? If so, welcome back!
You’re actually proposing they pay unemployed people to hunt bears? There’s a high unemployment rate in Western Maryland as it is - those people already hunt just to (literally) put food on the table. I can see where this might be a good idea in theroy, but not in practice.
IIRC, the way the bear hunt works is that those interested apply for the licenses, all the applications are put in… something (like a hat - I’m being a little facetious here), and then a select number are drawn out, lottery-style. Only a certain number of those who apply are given bear-hunting licenses. It’s not like some free-for-all.
For deer season, everyone who wants a deer license gets one. The bear hunt is very limited.
It appears to me that one of the best objections to those who claim “hunting for enjoyment is immoral” was just made by mswas up there in post number 116. Since it is being entirely ignored by the faction proclaiming immorality, I think it bears repeating before it gets lost. Perhaps some of you could comment on it.
Well done Erek.
Bullshit. It’s not different at all. Hunting is the method that predators use to catch their prey. If you admit that humans are predators, than you are admitting that hunting behavior is genetic. You’re playing word game simply because you can’t admit that you’re wrong. Grow up a bit and learn that sometimes you make mistakes, and it’s ok to say “You know what? I was wrong”.
Again, not really. As someone else pointed out, nowadays most people just pay someone else to kill and butcher their meat for them. The need hasn’t changed, just the delivery method.
Why should I address it? It’s meaningless. The results are exactly the same. Trigger pulled, animal dead. Tell me, if eating the meat is moral and not eating it isn’t, what percentage of the animal dressed out tips the act over your mythical morality line? 10%? 30%? 50%? How about if I just eat the liver? Do I have to tan the hide and make moccasins to qualify, or is taking the tenderloin and a haunch enough? How about if I have the body mounted and stuffed and take it around to schools to educate children, but don’t eat the meat because I’m a vegetarian, is that moral? I haven’t addressed the “distinction” because it’s stupid and meaningless.
Jesus, you are a simple sort. You consistently demonstrate the inability to grasp any concept that is more nuanced than an ice cube. What is so hard for you to understand? Morals exist on more than one level. Their are societal morals, things that a vast majority of the people in America say are WRONG, capital W, You-can’t-do-this wrong. These are things that we pass laws about to punish people who do them. Then there are personal morals, which should form the basis for each individual’s behavior, but which one individual has no right to impose upon another individual. It’s a stunningly simple concept, why is it so fucking hard for you to see? It’s not contradictory at all, and it’s not a misunderstanding of the nature of morality at all. Denying that morals exist on several levels is not just a misunderstanding of their nature, it’s a frightening level of ignorance, the kind that leads to the terrifying moral absolutism of a dictator or a fanatic.
Really? Those people who said flat out “If you hunt for sport, than you are immoral”, they weren’t judging people who hunt for sport? They are condemning others because of something that they themselves would not do.
Nope. I am enjoying something that required the death of an animal as part of the process. I am not enjoying the actual act of killing the animal.
I do not say it is immoral to hunt for food. I say it is immoral to hunt for fun.
Nope. Nor is it immoral for a modern-day recreational hunter to enjoy going into the wilds, having a beer with his buddies etc. It’s just the enjoying of the killing bit.
I agree - it is not less moral. I would kill an animal for food (I have worked on a cattle and sheep farm and worked in a butchers shop). I would be pretty disgusted with myself if I actually enjoyed the killing itself, though.
Thanks. I have a love/hate relationship with these boards, so I frequently engage in lurkeration. 
I just got in a mood about this thread, y’know?
Correct. And in my case (although you did not address the comment to me) I do not want my morals forcibly imposed on others. However, there is nothing wrong with my expressing my views in a discussion forum in the hope that maybe someone somewhere will think “hey, I hadn’t thought of it that way”.
Yeah, I read it, and it seemed (and still seems) to imply that you think that moral issues shouldn’t be legally regulated except for the issues most people agree on. And that sounds crazy to me.
By that reasoning, it would have been inappropriate to mandate equal civil rights for blacks, because there wasn’t a 90% majority of the population that agreed that blacks were morally entitled to them. (Same for legislating equal rights for gays these days.) Similarly, there are probably large supermajorities of people who would consider it immoral to say “Mom, go fuck yourself” or “Jesus Christ was a bastard and his mother was a whore”, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make a law prohibiting such remarks.
I think your black-and-white distinction between “public” morality, where we just legislate beliefs that (almost) everybody already shares, and “private” morality, where we can all hold different views but nobody gets to make laws about them, is way too simplistic. Sure, different levels of morality exist, but they aren’t determined on the basis of a popularity contest.
Humans can be meat-eaters without being hunters, though. In fact, some anthropologists suggest that human carnivorism began mostly with scavenging carcasses that had died of natural causes or been killed by other predators.
In any case, the “genetic” argument is weak; just because humans have done something for a very long time doesn’t necessarily mean we’re actually genetically programmed to do it. It can be an important part of our history and society and heritage without actually being coded for in our genes.
And I’ll note that as far as we can tell from the OP’s link, none of the people he’s complaining about who criticized the hunters were actually advocating a legal ban on hunting, for children or anyone else. They were simply expressing their own views that what the girl did was wrong.